The Serbian prime minister and president have been working hard on their makeover as modern, reformist, pro-European leaders. But, as much as they would like to forget, the return of the ghost of the past is inevitably dragging out all their skeletons out of the closet and reminding people of their shady past.

Although the return of Seselj is not likely to affect Vucic’s widespread popularity or cause any major shifts on the political scene, it has brought back unpleasant images of the past that Serbia’s leaders prefer to forget, from passionate nationalistic speeches to emotional displays of allegiance to their once-beloved leader.

When Seselj, the creator of their political biographies, returned to the country, Vucic and Nikolic showed no clear readiness to take a stand against their own past and former ideologies, which are completely different from the ones that helped them to win power in Serbia and launch membership talks with the EU.

“Serbia does not owe it to anyone to comment on the statements of its citizens, especially those who do not mean anything in [Serbian] politics,” asserted Nikolic.

“There is nothing in today’s Serbia that could link our government to Vojislav Seselj,” said Vucic.

They are, however, linked by a decade in which wars raged in the former Yugoslavia and Serbia was hit by international sanctions and NATO bombs aimed at the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, which they supported.
One of Seselj’s first political associates was Nikolic. It was at his initiative that the Serbian Radical Party was set up on February 23, 1991, in a merger between the People’s Radical Party and Seselj’s Serbian Chetnik Movement.

Seselj was elected party leader and, in the following years, Nikolic was elected his deputy three times. It’s a sign of their political closeness and friendship that not only was Seselj godfather to Nikolic's grandson, but he also declared: “I consider Toma Nikolic to be a part of my body and my personality.”

Nikolic meanwhile made no effort to hide his admiration for his leader: “Seselj is the greatest intellectual I have ever met. He was the one who told me, and I am not ashamed to say this, what books I needed to read first if I wanted to become a successful politician. I did what he told me. I studied a lot and I learned,” he once said.

During the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Nikolic followed Seselj’s lead. He organised paramilitary volunteers from Kragujevac on two occasions and spent two months as a volunteer fighter himself in the Croatian village of Antin. It was probably because of such merits that Seselj awarded Nikolic the title of Chetnik Duke on May 13, 1993.

That same year, Vucic joined the party. At the time he was presented as a brilliant graduate of Belgrade Law School and less often as a journalist who had spent several months working for Channel S in the Bosnian Serb stronghold of Pale during the siege of Sarajevo.

Many years later, in June 2013, testifying for the defence of Radovan Karadzic at the Hague Tribunal, Seselj explained how the Radical Party always used to help Serbs in Bosnia:“Before he joined our party, our general secretary Aleksandar Vucic was a volunteer in the Chetnik unit with Slavko Aleksic at the Jewish cemetery, and was then pulled back to work on TV Pale.”
Vucic has never commented on this assertion nor can it be found anywhere in the indictments of the Hague Tribunal prosecution or of the Bosnia and Herzegovina prosecutor’s office.

Meanwhile allegations by the Belgrade-based Humanitarian Law Centre that Nikolic committed a war crime in Antin were never proved and Natasa Kandic, at the time the centre’s director, was fined 200,000 dinars (1,650 euro) for criminally libelling Nikolic.

Waging a war for a Greater Serbia was the Serbian Radical Party’s undisguised policy, loudly advocated and pursued by Seselj. Nikolic and Vucic unconditionally followed him on his path.

The minute that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic started peace negotiations, they became the loudest critics of his governing Socialists.
Seselj and Nikolic spent two months in detention together because they held an unauthorised rally in June 1995, protesting against what they said were Milosevic’s plans to recognise Bosnia and Herzegovina with its WWII Partisan-era borders.

Vucic advanced fast in the party leadership, becoming its general secretary in 1995. When the Radicals came to power in Zemun in 1996, he became the youngest director in Serbia at the time, at the age of 26 – he got to manage the local sports centre.

Despite being detained for protesting against Milosevic, Nikolic and Vucic agreed two years later, in 1998, to become ministers in his government.
"As for Aleksandar Vucic, his loyalty has never been questioned and I think he will be loyal, devoted member of the party," Seselj told BK TV in 2003.

In 2005, Vucic still had warm words for Seselj: “He created us, he is someone by whose side we become someone and something… There is no doubt that he is one of Serbia’s leaders, who history will study as a hero of the Serbian people”.
When they saw Seselj off to the Netherlands, all in tears, after he gave himself up to the Hague Tribunal in February 2003, both men, who he had tasked with leading his party in his absence, swore allegiance to their leader.
“Whatever Voja says from The Hague, we will take as gospel,” Vucic pledged.

Judging by what Seselj said, the following years saw efforts by the two men to mount a coup in the party.
Seselj also accused Vucic, who visited him at the Hague Tribunal detention unit as a legal adviser, of bugging Nikolic: “Vucic purchased 35,000 euros’ worth of some equipment for wire-tapping and he intercepted phone calls of everyone in the party. He would intercept Nikolic’s phone conversations with [Serbian President Boris] Tadic, put it all down on paper and bring it for me to read each time he came,” Seselj said when he returned to Belgrade in November.

The final split between the allies happened in September 2008, when Nikolic left the Radical Party and, a month later, founded the Serbian Progressive Party.
The reason for the split with Seselj was officially described as “differences in opinion in connection with the adoption of the EU-Serbia Stabilisation and Association Agreement”. Nikolic was soon joined by Vucic and many other Radical Party members.

In an interview in September 2008, Nikolic said however that he hadn’t changed much politically: “I did not change a single stance since I left the SRS [Serbian Radical Party], I still dream of a Greater Serbia, I still wouldn’t extradite Mladic to The Hague, but no one is any longer allowed to say that Serbia doesn’t want [to go] into the EU.”

An angry Seselj then published books denouncing his former allies, Sanader’s Kitten Aleksandar Vucic and The Hague Informer Tomislav Nikolic.
Vucic even threatened him at one point: “It would be much better for Seselj to keep quiet. All it would take would be for me to say two sentences and you would see how he would withdraw all the books of this world,” he said.

In July 2010, Nikolic said that he had learned from the police that Seselj had ordered his assassination and threatened his family. “I mustn’t take this lightly,” Nikolic said at the time. “When you are dealing with a monster, who he will go after?”

After the Serbian Progressive Party’s election victory in March 2012, Seselj’s main goal became the toppling of Vucic’s and Nikolic’s government.
In his closing statement at his trial in March 2012, he accused them of being part of an international conspiracy aimed at giving away Kosovo.

“Nikolic and Vucic will accept Kosovo’s independence. The incumbent government is not fully ready for betrayal, but they are,” he claimed.

Now, despite his release from the Hague Tribunal’s custody, Seselj is unlikely to be able to oust the government.
The Radicals are polling below the threshold they need to pass to enter parliament, they have practically no party infrastructure, nor any money to operate, and Seselj has no access to leading media, which are controlled by the government.

Seselj is also unlikely to be able to taint the approval that Vucic enjoys both in the country and among his Western friends.

The one thing that he has managed to do, however, is to make his former associates recoil from the dark shadow of their own past. No matter how badly they want to get away from it, Vojislav Seselj is reminding both them and the Serbian people that it’s still there.